Last year marked my 20th year releasing electronic music as an artist.

I started dabbling with electronic music and made my first tracks already back in 1996. But I started releasing music to the public in the following year. Back then I was using tracker software to make music and I ran a tracker scene label called Rebound. We released more than 100 tracks as free downloads within a timespan of about 4 years.

There’s a request I keep getting regularly. It comes in different shapes and forms but the gist is always the same. Here’s an example of an email I received:

“I began with the program Logic pro X. But i have a problem: I want to get some plug ins for this program, i’d like to get it for free, because buying it is too expensive for me at the moment, so i like to download it, but it’s so hard to find it…

This is a guest post by Jake from www.cryonautmedia.com. To learn how to get started with sound design, download his free 10 step guide to sound design here.

If you were to ask 100 producers whether they use presets or create their own original sounds, you would probably find the results to be pretty evenly split. While some producers use presets as they are, or tweak them a little, others refuse to use any sound they didn’t create themselves. This is a fiercely debated topic. In this article, we’ll examine the merits of both sides, and then go over one way you can use presets to your advantage when it comes to learning and doing sound design.

In the Smart Productivity for Musicians course I have created (update 6th Jan 2018: course not available anymore) there is a full lesson about dissolving procrastination. Here are some further thoughts on the topic.

Before you can deal with procrastination, you must identify procrastination. And it’s not as simple as it may seem!